Tag Archives: Takeover Day

Essex Museum Development is offering grants of up to £500 to support the delivery of learning and community engagement using collections.

The grants aim to support local museums to:

Develop relationships with local education providers including schools, colleges and home education groups

Develop new learning and engagement resources

Develop an adult learning offer

Deliver activities which will reach new audiences

Make their venue more accessible for disabled audiences

The funding scheme is open to any Accredited museum (or museum registered as Working Towards Accreditation) within the Essex or Southend-on-Sea local authority boundaries. Please note that to apply you must have attended at least two of the following training days:

It is important to read the guidance document before applying. It contains some suggestions as to what the grant can be used for, but this is not an exhaustive list. Please do get in contact if you wish to discuss your ideas.

Essex Museum Development is offering grants of up to £500 to support the delivery of learning and community engagement using collections.

The grants aim to support local museums to:

Develop relationships with local education providers including schools, colleges and home education groups

Develop new learning and engagement resources

Develop an adult learning offer

Deliver activities which will reach new audiences

Make their venue more accessible for disabled audiences

The funding scheme is open to any Accredited museum (or museum registered as Working Towards Accreditation) within the Essex or Southend-on-Sea local authority boundaries.

It is important to read the guidance document before applying. It contains some suggestions as to what the grant can be used for, but this is not an exhaustive list. Please do get in contact if you wish to discuss your ideas.

Francesca Pellegrino is the Audience Development Officer for
Epping Forest District and Lowewood Museums. In this guest post, she talks about her work with young volunteers.

As you may know Epping Forest District Museum is currently closed for a Heritage Lottery Fund redevelopment project. Whilst this is underway we are running and launching a number of new initiatives at our sister site Lowewood Museum before adopting the same model in the newly redeveloped museum in Waltham Abbey.

One of these new initiatives is a Youth Panel. After an extremely successful first attempt at Takeover Day in 2014 (part of a pilot project with SHARE Museums East to get more museums involved in this Kids in Museums initiative) we decided to setup a youth panel.

The group designed their own logo

The youth panel is aimed at ages 14-24 and the group will be given the opportunity to influence the types of events and activities the museum runs for the museum, act as consultants on the museum’s programme and take on projects and events throughout the year. The project is also the chance to learn lots of new skills, build a cv and meet people.

The youth panel meets once a month and has been running for a few months now. Their first project is to curate the final exhibition in the museum’s exhibition programme. They have decided the theme of the exhibition and will be working on all elements including the research, panel and label making, selecting and displaying objects as well as organising the private view and opening of the exhibition. As part of a special SHARE pilot project on the use of digital elements within the museum environment, the youth panel have decided to incorporate digital interactives into their exhibtion.

Here is what two members of the youth panel have to say about the project so far:

The Youth Panel is a group of young people who more or less take over the running of the museum, and we decide in what ways we make the museum more fun for the younger community. So far we have started the process of planning an exhibition that will go ahead later in the year. I feel the use of digital elements would enhance not only our learning but the learning of the members of the public that come in. I have enjoyed having fun and letting our imagination run wild in the planning of the exhibition.
JOSHUA

The Youth Panel is an organisation for young people to get together and take over the running of the museum and so far we have been planning for a new exhibition that is opening in October about the history of the schools in the area. I feel this will help bring in more young people into the museum. I have enjoyed the fact that I meet new people and get to know them, which helps me build my confidence up.
JESSICA

School’s Out: celebrating the history and memories of school life in the Borough of Broxbourne opens on Saturday 10 October.

On Wednesday 4th February, SHARE Museums East and ROH & NNF Bridges ran their third annual Children & Young People Conference at Coleridge Community College, Cambridge. “Object Lessons 2- Celebrating Creativity and Partnerships in work with Children and Young People” was attended by museum staff, volunteers and freelancers from throughout the region and the full programme can be found here.

“I had really been in two minds about attending the SHARE conference. As is so often the case, with so much to do and so little time, a day in the office catching up with current projects seemed a good option. But, once again the conference proved a good reminder of the importance of getting out, sharing ideas and experiences, and most of all being inspired by the huge amount of talent and creativity within the sector.
The day got off to a good start with a warm welcome by Bev Jones, head teacher of Coleridge Community College, our base for the day. Bev’s commitment to developing creativity and a sense of community amongst the students in her school and recognising the role museums can play in this make her a great advocate for our sector.
The keynote speakers all set clear messages for the day – Susan Raikes, from the British Museum gave a timely reminder that ultimately it is the objects in our collections that are at the centre of memorable, inspirational learning experiences. Paul Collard gave us some fascinating case studies of putting creativity at the heart of learning, what this can look like and what it can achieve for young people.
The breakout session ‘Why should I bother with arts award’ by Ancient House Museum in Thetford, answered the question very well. I was convinced to give it another go in our museum by the demonstration of very simple but highly effective ways of delivering it as part of an existing programme. There was also a wonderful bonus presentation by a member of the teenage history club at the museum, a wonderful advocate for the benefits such a group could bring both to young people and the museum itself. I very much hope they get their funding to visit Japan to develop their project on flint – to inspire such ambition and ideas among young people was a testament to how much confidence this group had given them.
After a good lunch, the breakout session on Lifelines, the Start Hospices project by the Fitzwilliam Museum was a very informed presentation about the value of working with families with life limited children and the practicalities of what such work can involve. It was particularly interesting to hear how much support was available from practitioners within the hospice movement itself, from psychologists who could help with managing the personal and emotional challenges of working with this group to family workers, art and play therapists.
Jo Roberts’ presentation on establishing a framework for professional development was a timely reminder of how important it is to place a value on our skills and experiences to ensure museums do recognise the value of having experienced practitioners in learning roles at a time when many museums are facing cutbacks.
The final project reports from SHARE’s Takeover Day Cohort members Francesca Pellegrino at Lowewood Museum and Nollie Cacciatore at Much Hadham Forge Museum, showed how flexible this programme is in terms of how you choose to deliver it, but that having Takeover Day as the focus really helps to get young people on board.
Steph Parmee, from Gainsborough House Museum closed the day with an entertaining and reassuring presentation showing how well even smaller specialist museums including Newmarket Horse Racing Museum have adapted to the challenge of the new curriculum and continue to offer creative learning experiences that directly engage learners with their unique collections.”The film of Lowewood Museum’s Takeover Day project is available here. Jo Roberts was presenting on the Group for Education in Museums (GEM) new foundation course in Museum Learning, more details of which are available here.